Yesterday’s Google doodle commemorated the 120th anniversary of his birth. Since this movie pioneer’s works were always a huge component of Russian culture courses I taught at Ohio State, I’d like to use this opportunity to share some uncommon observations I’ve made over the years.

His Battleship Potemkin, depicting rebelling sailors and civilians following the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, is best known for its “Odessa Steps” scene, in which tsarist troops crush the uprising. The image of a baby carriage rolling down a multitiered outdoor staircase, the child’s caretaker having apparently been shot, has become thoroughly embossed on the world of cinematography. It is at once heartrending and an iconic textbook example of early, innovative technique.

It has also been widely imitated. Director David Lean tips his hat to Eisenstein in Dr. Zhivago, in a scene in which protestors are shot in the (failed) 1905 Russian Revolution. Their beat of their march is banged out of a parade-style bass drum, but after soldiers on horseback fire into the crowd, the instrument rolls, bereft of its player, down the street. Madonna seems to have taken a cue from The Odessa Steps in her 2013 short, Secret Project Revolution, co-created with Ste. In one shot, bare-chested males dance in front of a burning pram. With its large, old-fashioned wheels, it looks a century old, it just had to allude to the old Soviet director.

Probably Eisenstein’s most enduring influence was on George Lucas. As a student at UCLA’s film school in the late 1960’s, the budding director would have had plenty of exposure to Potemkin. As well as Alexander Nevsky, about a 13th-century saint/warrior who repelled an incursion by the Teutonic Knights into the Republic of Novgorod, an autonomous Russian city some two hundred miles inland from the Baltic Sea. The German monastic order was much reputed for pillaging and raping rather than for any Christian charity, yet Eisenstein ramps up the imagery to epitome-of-evil proportions. The military leaders of the Knights wear helmets topped by twisted talons and ram’s horns—perhaps only a slight exaggeration. The foot-soldiers’ headgear completely obscures their faces, dehumanizing these Crusaders. And they throw Russian babies on a fire!

Swastikas adorn the miter of the bishop who accompanies them—certainly an unhistorical smear. He holds Mass while a cowled monk plays a droning organ—doubtless brought by sleigh across the snow as part of the entourage, in spite of all the logistical problems it entails. This unrealistic detail, I suspect, is meant to heighten the contrast between Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, whose traditional liturgies have only a cappella music. They’re a dark Other from the West. The dirge-like music is part of the score by Sergei Prokofiev, whose sinister half-tones serve as boos and hisses every time the evildoers appear onscreen. As the 1938 film was shelved under Stalin’s orders after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and not released until the 1950s, the soundtrack became damaged. But the scratchiness actually improves the effect—though a remastered version has come out in recent years.

The German and Russian camps finally duke it out on the frozen Lake Peipus, and the Crusaders plunge ingloriously into the water, weighed down, of course, by all that chainmail. The wintry battleground is widely regarded as the inspiration behind the battle on Hoth, the ice planet, in Star Wars 5. If you need further evidence of the Eisenstein-Lucas connection, consider that Skywalker Ranch, George’s hundred-million-dollar pad in Marin County, has an Eisenstein suite.

Finally, consider the side-by-side stills of Alexander Nevsky and Star Wars characters and scenes in this blog entry’s slideshow. I submit that both Darth Vader and the Emperor owe their costuming to the Eisenstein film. In any event, Eisenstein’s legacy in indisputable.

​2017 was a very, very good to me, I might say in the role of immigrant Pasquale. Here are some of the things that delighted me most.

​JanuaryDid a major translation of 120 pages, a private contract of a book of days for a Czech serving in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1906-09.

February​​Played the role of Pasquale in The Most Happy Fella, my first time in a musical.

July​Appeared in Young Frankenstein: The Musical as Inspector Kemp. This summer production by North Street Playhouse was fun and hard work. The professional actors/singers/dancers hired for the program also served as mentors to the young people interning. While I was “local adult talent,” their presence really raised the bar for me. I was flattered to have the opening lines – well, the first of any length, that is, and the ones the get the opening laughs and set the tone. I also had the vocal solo in the opening number to Act II, which challenged me with holding a high F for six measures.

August​In another translation job, I had to decipher hand-writing in a letter from the 1960s, written by an elderly lady in Rusyn, in an old, Hungarian-style script (nowadays it’s written in Cyrillic). I’ve had zero instruction in Rusyn and it was in a thick dialect, but I was able to interpolate from my knowledge of neighboring languages. For the most part—some phrases were too difficult to figure out reliably. But it was enough to give the client a picture of life in the Old World—and to make contact with previously unknown relatives here in the States.

Began work as Chess Coach at the Eastern Shore Community College.

September – finally figured out all the words and chords of the Russian Gypsy song “Poy, zveni, moya gitara.” I couldn’t find guitar tabs, and even the lyrics I located online didn’t quite correspond to the version I’d seen on YouTube that I liked so much. Anyway, after three years of off-and-on attempts, I finally got it and premiered it at the (Cape Charles, VA) Lemon Tree Gallery’s open mike night on the 15th.

November​Played three (small) roles in “The Man Who Came to Dinner”

Gave a talk at the Science and Philosophy Seminar at Eastern Shore Community College: “Travels with Franz Ferdinand: Or How WWI Kicked Off.” It was a mix of slide show, video, and history on my trip around the former Austria-Hungary in summer 2014.

Finished a first draft of my book on that trip, “Travels with Ferdinand and Friends.”

December​Added several songs to my Christmas repertoire and played a really nice Christmas Eve gig in Bizzotto’s restaurant in Onancock, VA, in addition to three open mike appearances.

November 22 is the feast of St. Cecilia, and as a musician, I just have to celebrate. All the more as I once sang in a choir named for her. That was for one year in the East Slovak city of Košice.

As I was about to move there after a three-year stint in Central Slovakia, a Roma violinist friend of mine put me in touch with the organist/conductor from the Cathedral of St. Elizabeth in Košice.

When I arrived in September, the group was at a choral competition in France, from which they returned with second prize. Once I started rehearsing with them, I realized I was somewhere in the bottom quarter of the talent pool. About half were conservatory students or grads; a good number sang—a couple as principals—in the opera.

At the center of the story is the remarkable conductor Viliam Gurbal. Born into a musical family he grew up playing several instruments, but studied electronics – a skill he still employs in recording. He met my friend Alexander Dasko of www.GypsyMusic.sk during their mandatory military service and they played in a group – Alex on violin and Vilo in cimbal, an East-Central European hammer dulcimer with a three-and-a-half-octave range. They’ve kept in touch all these years, though they live about four hours apart.

In addition to church organ duties, umpteen Masses per week, Vilo still plays cimbal in an ensemble, often at weddings. A few years ago I saw him play with young Gypsies, helping them gain experience. The interesting thing was that, during breaks, Vilo would use every spare minute to transcribe musical manuscripts on his laptop. His head would twist from yellowed old sheets on the table to the computer screen.

For years, he’d been borrowing works from the city archives, then transcribing and recording. Then I began to understand why everything we sang in the chorus had a St. Cecilia copyright mark on it. I further unraveled the mystery of Vilo when a friend suggested that he did the transcribing in part because it familiarized him with every single not.

Vilo also played a significant role in the selection of Košice as European Capital of Culture for 2013, as a number of his projects were part of the competition entry. You can read more about Vilo and Kosice in an article I wrote six years ago. (Of course, there’s more on the life and traditions of St. Cecilia on Wikipedia.)

I've been delighted and honored to sing with the St. Cecilia choir on various occasions on visits to Europe in the years since I lived there full-time.

I'll leave you now with this interview with Vilo (in Slovak), followed by clips from a performance. The first song (starts about 3:30) is "O beata et gloriosa/O blessed and glorious," a Marian hymn I've sung with them many times.

I'm not waxing romantic today. I’m tired of false history. Nicholas II had abdicated in March of 1917. What the Bolsheviks overthrew was the (second) provisional government following that resignation.

I'm delighted to see that the Google doodle for today celebrates pad thai. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with any anniversary of the invention of the Thai national dish. Maybe the choice has more to do with avoidance of the October "Revolution."

Monday’s eclipse – about 85% where I live – brought back memories of summer 1999, when I had the chance to observe an eclipse in Europe. I was taking Czech at František Palacký University’s Summer School of Slavonic Languages, which attracts students from all over Europe, as well as from Asia and the Americas. We took time off from language classes to observe the phenomenon with locals from the area at Svatý Kopeček, a monastery and pilgrimage site on a hill on the outskirts of Olomouc. A pleasant late-morning outing, indeed!

Olomouc, for what it’s worth, is the historical capital of Northern Moravia and the Czech Republic’s second most important town – after Prague naturally – when it comes to history and architecture. With a population of 120,000 it’s a bit bucolic compared to the capital, but it’s a wonderful place to wander the streets or sit in a café and take in the surroundings in peace.

​Michael’s Ondaatje’s The English Patient should appeal to travelers, with its settings from post-war Italy to inter-war Egypt. As someone with Hungarian interests, I find the historical personality behind the title character fascinating.

The “English Patient,” suffering from burns over most of his body is recovering in a partially bombed out and abandoned Italian monastery. A Canadian nurse takes care of him, reading his copy of Herodotus’ The Histories, his only remaining possession, aloud to him. In the process, the patient gradually regains memories of his desert exploration years before, when he had an affair with the wife of an expedition member. The reader gradually learns he is László Almásy, a Hungarian aristocrat who acquired a native-like English accent from attending a British school in childhood.

The historical Almásy, on which Ondaatje basis the patient, served in the Austro-Hungarian military in WWI, charted much of the North African desert in the inter-war period, and was later recruited for Germany in WWII. In the novel, at least, he uses his unique knowledge of the desert to guide German spies through the desert—a feat the enemy finds nearly impossible to trace, due in part to numerous sandstorms. As a linguist, I’m intrigued by Almásy’s discovery (not mentioned in the novel) of the Magyarab tribe, descendants of 16th-century Hungarian soldiers serving in the Ottoman Empire and their Nubian wives. They now speak Arabic, but their name is derived from the ethnonym Magyar, meaning “Hungarian.” Contrary to this work of fiction, Almásy was apparently a gay man.

For the most part, Ondaatje moves easily between one time frame and the next in presenting Almásy’s gradual recollections of his past—and the others’ discoveries of it, particularly as he blabs under the influence of morphine. I still found the author was sometimes inconsistent in tense shifts as he moved from present scene to flashback and returned to the present.

But the novel more than compensates for such moments of confusion with its vivid characters. Hana has an affair with a Sikh British sapper, who also takes up temporary residence in the building. He apparently finds his “flow” in defusing bombs; he can’t get enough of the challenge. He’s a useful person to have around, given the ubiquity of bombs left by retreating Germans—nurse Hana can’t even play the piano for fear it’s booby trapped. The fourth main character is the thief, an Italian-Canadian man who gets his thumbs cut off when he’s caught spying for the Allies. Some of the portions told from his point of view are among the most insightful of the book.

While there is debate over how much it had to do with the actual fall of the Wall, the 30th anniversary of Reagan’s speech is worth commemorating. It came during my idealistic college years, at a time when I dated a German girl, had a German-American fraternity brother, and was starting to learn the language myself. When East German protests and freedom trains became nightly news in autumn 1989 – my final college semester – we students would shout “Tear down the Wall!” at the on-screen images.

I knew then it wasn’t Reagan’s work alone. John Paul II and Lech Wałęsa were instrumental in Poland, as was Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Years later I learned about Otto von Habsburg, last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, and his role in the Pan-European Picnic, held near the border between Hungary and Austria in August 1989. The frontier would be "open" symbolically for a few hours. When hundreds of East Germans seeking a route to the West (or just hanging out at that old socialist vacation spot, West-Central Hungary’s Lake Balaton) got wind of it and showed up at the crossing, confused Hungarian border guards let them through. Then thousands more began seeking asylum, even climbing over the fence and into West Germany’s embassy compound in Prague. And then an East German official misspoke on the night of 10-11 November, and the rest is history.

I left for Czechoslovakia the next fall, and that’s when my passion for travel began.

“In the eighties, groups of tourists from Eastern Europe started to Venice,” writes Tiziano Scarpa in Venice is a Fish. “From dawn to dusk they wandered along the calli in well-behaved committees. They had travelled through the night from Budapest or Prague to feast their eyes on as many cities as possible in twelve hours.”

In addition to my affinity for the grande viaggiatore Marco Polo and the very name Mark (the city’s patron, as I wrote in April), that’s my personal connection to the book and to Venice. You see, in the nineties, I was one of those tourists, an American travelling by bus with a Slovak chorus. In our case, the overnight trip was from Central Slovakia to Trent, a couple of hours to the northwest of the city of canals. After a couple of concerts and three nights in dormitories, we (foolishly) travelled overnight to the Republic of San Marino, several hours south—which just wasn’t worth the hardship. Then we went back up Italy’s Adriatic Coast and spent a couple of hours in Venice before continuing to Croatia to give more concerts. Much more than twelve hours, but Scarpa is essentially right.

Venice native Scarpa’s portrays out-of-the-way places – and many common ones – lovingly; that is, like a lover who knows the other’s body all too well. Not all the smells are pleasant. Nor are all the other sensations of Venice. “Feel how your toes turn prehensile on the steps of the bridges, clutching at worn or squared edges as you climb; your soles brake you on the way down, your heels halt you,” he writes in the chapter “feet” (lowercase in my English edition—all the chapters are body parts). He observes that Venitians have little heart disease, thanks to all the stair climbing. In “mouth,” he introduces you to the city’s dialect and cuisine.

Venice is a Fish is a feast for all the senses. A movable feast, at 5 x 7” and 150 pp., you can easily take it on vacation, even to less exotic locales. Published in Italian in 2000, English translation 2008 by Shaun Whiteside.

I’ll start this entry with links to two articles of concern, I don’t like to get political, but sometimes it’s inevitable. And so, I have just begun work as a volunteer translator for http://www.rightsinrussia.org/, a UK-based site. Apparently, it is more dangerous to be a journalist in Turkey nowadays than in Russia, as this article details. Since my Balkans trip in 2014, I have been much more conscious of Turkey’s influence on European history—including the Ottoman Empire becoming a refuge for persecuted Jews. And there’s the dark side, the Armenian genocide, among other things. The second link is to a nicely nuanced NY Times story on China’s odd status as colonial power.

Since my previous post was on Venice, I thought I’d follow up with this story about limiting fast food vendors in an attempt to maintain the city’s integrity. Travel news buffs know about its attempts to curb the number of tourists—a phenomenon that’s been seen in other cities, like Barcelona, and sights such as Machu Picchu.

Finally, since my main focus is on Central Europe and the years that I lived there, I have to mention that “The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz” celebrates 150 years in 2017. It premiered in a male chorus version 15 February 1867. I’m a bit late you think? Well, on that anniversary date I was heavily involved in the four-day run of the musical The Most Happy Fella. But I can make up for it now, since the orchestral arrangement everyone knows premiered in May 1867 in conjunction with the Paris World Expo.

Below, please have a look at the Video from the Vienna Philharmonic’s 2010 New Year’s Concert. I chose it for the views of the river in several countries, flowing from modern-day Austria through Hungary, Serbia, etc. I'm sorry they missed Slovakia. I’ll come back with a fuller entry next week, with some pics from my own travels at various points on the Danube.

Also coming up this month: Summer Reading List. I'll review Tiziano Scarpa's Venice is a Fish, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Rick Steve's Travel as a Political Act.

Because I haven’t been there on April 25, a reMARKable date in the City of Canals. It’s the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, whose relics are in St. Mark’s Basilica on Piazza San Marco, where you’ll also see a winged lion, symbol of the saint, atop a column. There’s even a street called Via XXV Aprile, so close is the date linked with the city's patron.

And since my name is Mark, April 25 is my name day or saint’s day, I’m fascinated by the Venetian customs. But my story begins in Slovakia, where I would MARK the occasion like anyone else celebrating a name day, a tradition that had become largely secularized after four decades of Communist Party rule. (Name days exist largely in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, where there’s a saint for every day of the year.) I would provide wine or schnapps for my teacher colleagues – yes, alcohol in a secondary school, I know, I know – and fellow choir members. They would give me flowers and candy. Females, a majority in both groups, would line up to shake hands, kiss me on the cheek, and say, “I wish you all the best on your name day: lots of love, happiness, and success, but mainly love.” They almost competed with each other at elocution.

Venice's association with St. Mark goes back to 828, when according to legend, his bones were smuggled out of Alexandria, Cairo. In pig lard or some form of pork, so the story goes, so that the Muslim customs officials wouldn't even touch anything.

Nowadays Venetian men give women roses, which has become a symbol of the day. There is a large procession and, naturally, a special Mass in the basilica. It also happens to be the anniversary of liberation in WWII. Here’s a web page that explains the customs more thoroughly.